Mercy (The Night Man Chronicles Book 3)

by Brett Battles

  “May I?” Jar asks.

  He grimaces and nods.

  She lifts the shirt upward until we can see another bruise on his side, under his left arm. While it is larger than the ones on his biceps, it’s not nearly as bad.

  “I-I-I ran into a, um, bookcase,” he says.

  I raise an eyebrow. “Ran into? Or was pushed into?”

  A downward glance is all the answer I need.

  “That and the ones on your arms—from your father, right?”

  A breath, then an ever-so-slight nod.

  “What about Sawyer?” Jar asks. “Is he injured, too?”

  “No. I, um…he…. It was my fault. That’s all. I should have…”

  I give it a beat before saying, “You should have what?”

  Another breath. “It doesn’t matter.”

  I know now is not the time to think about myself, but I can’t keep from sending out a silent thank you to my parents for being decent people.

  I lean forward, resting my elbows on the table. “Listen to me very carefully. Those bruises are not your fault. No one should ever do that to you. Especially one of your parents. You know that, right?”

  Another nod, also slight.

  “I mean it.”

  His head moves again, same as before.

  I’m sure that intellectually he knows I’m right, but it’s clear he’s having a hard time applying my words to himself.

  “What if it happened to one of your friends?” I ask. “Would you think it was their fault?”

  He says nothing.

  “What about the girl you were sitting with on the pier at the barbecue? What if her father was hurting her? Would she have deserved it?”

  For a second, he looks surprised, but he can’t be too shocked to find out I saw the two of them there. He already knows I was at the barbecue, after all.

  “Of course she wouldn’t deserve it,” he says.

  “Then neither do you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Tell us what happened,” Jar says.

  “Why? There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “That is not true.”

  His eyes widen and he says in a rush, “You can’t call the police!” More plea than demand.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “They’ll just let him go, and then he’ll—” He stops himself and looks as if he wishes he could take back the last few words.

  It’s not hard to figure out what he was going to say.

  “Why would they let him go?” I ask.

  “Because Uncle Richard would tell them to.”

  “Who is Uncle Richard?” Jar asks.

  “He-he’s the chief of police.”

  “And he’s your uncle?” I say.

  “Not my real uncle. My dad’s best friend from high school. They played football together.”

  No wonder Chuckie got out of his DUI. I doubt Uncle Richard would be able to cover up accusations of child abuse, though.

  “We’re not going to call the police,” I tell him. “Not right now.”

  “Not ever,” he says. “You can’t.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Please. You can’t do that. You have to promise me.”

  “Here’s what I will promise you. We will only call the police if we know for certain that there is no way your father can ever hurt you again. Can you live with that?”

  He grimaces but says, “I…I guess.”

  “There is one condition to this promise, though.”

  His eyes narrow. “What condition?”

  “That you tell us exactly what happened and answer any questions we might have. Can you do that?”

  A beat. “I can do that.”

  “Good. So?”

  He gives himself a second to gather his thoughts, then begins. “It happened after dinner. I don’t know the exact time, but before eight thirty. I was in my room, doing homework, when I heard yelling downstairs.”

  “Your father?”

  “At first, but then Sawyer screamed. He, um, does that sometimes, when someone tries to make him do something he doesn’t want to do.” He flicks a glance at Jar, then as if realizing he shouldn’t have, he quickly looks away again. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” Jar says. “I sometimes feel like screaming, too. Go on.”

  “I, um, I went downstairs to see if I could help. Sawyer listens to me. I’m not sure why but he always has.”

  “Because you’re his big brother.”

  A shrug. “I guess.” He pauses. “Dad had a few drinks before he came home last night, and more after.”

  “Does he drink often?” I ask. We haven’t seen Chuckie take a drink since the family returned to Mercy, but I am again reminded about that unpunished DUI.

  “Once every week or two, maybe. Not every night. And not always a lot…though the amount doesn’t really matter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He gets mean whether it’s one beer or ten.”

  “Don’t you mean meaner?”

  He glances up. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “When he does not drink, does he get physical?” Jar asks.

  “A little maybe, but not really. And not as rough, for sure.”

  “So, he had a few drinks last night, both before and after he came home,” I say. Evan nods. “And then something happened that upset Sawyer, and that’s what triggered your father?”

  “He’d told Sawyer to go to bed, but Sawyer always goes to bed at eighty thirty and it wasn’t eighty thirty yet. He likes things to…”

  “Follow a routine?” Jar suggests.

  “Yeah, exactly. If his schedule needs to change, we have to prepare him ahead of time so that he’s expecting it.”

  “And your dad didn’t do that?”

  Evan shakes his head. “I don’t know why he told him to go to bed early. He knows what happens when things are suddenly changed on Sawyer.”

  I bet I can guess why. A power play.

  Chuckie was a little—or a lot—drunk so his inhibitors were off. (Celebration of another farmhouse burning, perhaps?) He probably saw Sawyer sitting in front of the TV and became annoyed that his son operates by his own set of rules instead of Chuckie’s.

  Or maybe the boy just looked at him wrong.

  “When I got downstairs, it looked like he was going to grab Sawyer and carry him up to his bedroom,” Evan says. “That would have been even worse than changing Sawyer’s schedule. He’d be messed up for weeks. And…and I wasn’t quite sure what my dad might do when he got to Sawyer’s room.”

  An undercurrent of experience carries his last words. I don’t sense he means sexual abuse but physical for sure.

  “What did you do?” Jar asks.

  “The only thing I could. I got in between them.”

  “What about your mother? Where was she?”

  “She’d been upstairs, too. If she’d been with Sawyer, none of that would have happened.”

  “You know it’s not her fault, either, right?” I say.

  “I know,” he says, but I can tell he does lay at least a small percent of blame at her feet. I have a feeling she’s been doing the best she can, that probably without her interventions over the years, the situation would have gotten a lot worse a lot sooner.

  I give him a nod to continue.

  “Me getting in the way only made my dad more upset. He grabbed me and threw me out of the way. That’s when I hit the bookcase. He turned back to Sawyer, but before he could grab him, too, Mom ran in and told him no. She said some other things—I can’t remember what. It’s all kind of…mixed up, you know? She did calm him down, though. She told me to take Sawyer upstairs. I thought my father might try something, but all he did was glare at us as we walked out.

  “I took Sawyer to my room and told him to lie on my bed. I do that sometimes when he has a bad day so he’s used to it. I didn’t want him to be in his room alone, in case our dad wasn’t done with him.”

  “What happened n
ext?” I ask.

  “I listened to them yelling downstairs. Well, my dad yelling and my mom trying to smooth over everything.”

  “What was he yelling?”

  “Things like how hard his life is. How none of us understand the pressure he’s under. How we are all ungrateful, and we would all see real soon how stupid we’ve been to not give him the respect he deserves. He said some things about Sawyer and me, too, about how disappointed he is in us. How we’re not turning out the way he wanted us to be.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing I haven’t heard before.”

  “I’m sorry for all those times, too.”

  He doesn’t say anything to this, but for a moment he looks thankful.

  “Did either of them come and check on you?”

  “Mom did. Sawyer had already fallen asleep. He’s good at that kind of thing. She said everything’s going to be fine, but that we should stay out of our dad’s way as much as we can for the next few days.”

  “Did you show her your bruises?” Jar asks.

  “I didn’t see the point. She was already trying to put it all behind us. It’s the way she always does it.”

  “Because it’s the only way she knows how to survive and how to help you two survive, too.”

  He grimaces at Jar. “It’s not the only way.”

  “What I am saying is we all must find ways to keep going, and this is hers. Remember she has been caught in this a lot longer than you.”

  Barely able to contain his anger, he says, “Then why didn’t she leave a long time ago, when she realized he was an asshole?”

  “From what I’ve learned about people, it is because it is not that easy.” Jar sounds like an alien anthropologist, specializing in the humans of Earth. Which she kind of is. “I don’t know what happened with your mother, but I do know people are often blind to certain traits in the ones they love, especially early in a relationship. By the time they truly see their partner for who they are, they’ve become trapped, or at least feel they are. At first by the inability to know what to do, or to even act at all. Later, by other aspects. Like children.”

  “Are you saying me and my brother trapped her here?”

  “The choice to be born lies not with you or Sawyer. The two of you are not to blame for any of this. All I am saying is that she has been damaged and is trying to make it from day to day.”

  Evan thinks for a moment, his anger ebbing away, as he sees the truth in her words.

  Wanting to get things back on track, I ask, “What happened after she visited you?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Evan says. “I worried if I did, my father would come in. But even after I was sure he was asleep, I was too wound up. I began thinking about what might happen in the morning, and knew there was a good chance he would want to finish what he’d started. I wasn’t going to let him hurt Sawyer. And the only way to be sure that wouldn’t happen was to get my brother out of the house. I grabbed some of his warm clothes and a jacket, then we…um, snuck out.” He’s avoiding mentioning the actual method, but the only way they could have exited without having to turn off or trip the alarm was through his window, probably with Sawyer cradled between Evan’s body and the wall.

  “Did you leave a note?”

  “In Mom’s purse,” he says, nodding. “I told her not to worry. That we were going somewhere safe and would be back later.”

  “Do you really think that stopped her from being worried?”

  “Of course not. But at least she knows we were together and okay. I just didn’t want her calling everyone, trying to find us.”

  “What if your father was the one who found out you were gone?”

  “I…I don’t know. I guess if that happened, I’ll just have to deal with it.”

  “Are you really planning on going back?” Jar shoots me a sideways glance as she asks this.

  “Where else would we go?” Evan says. “My plan was only to give Da…to give him a little more time to cool down.”

  None of us say anything for several seconds.

  “Can I, uh, use your bathroom?” Evan asks.

  “It’s next to the room Sawyer’s in,” I say. “You can’t miss it.”

  As soon as he enters the hallway, Jar and I go out onto the front porch, leaving the door open so we’ll see Evan when he comes back. The rain is still hammering down and no one will be able to hear us.

  “We cannot let them go back,” Jar says, her voice low but full of urgency.

  I look out at the street. I know she’s right, but I need to get things straight in my head first. There are only two realistic directions we can move in now, and that’s using realistic generously. Neither direction is guaranteed to remove Chuckie from his kids’ lives forever, and both share a common problem—the lack of time.

  The first option is taking immediate action by getting the authorities involved right now. A trip to the ER would be the most logical step. Doctors and nurses are required by law to report incidents of potential child abuse. At least they are in California, so I assume the same is true here. But that would run into the whole Chuckie-is-a-friend-of-the-chief-of-police problem. We’d have to inform other agencies, both state and federal, to reduce the chance of the boys being reunited with Chuckie before a thorough investigation is conducted.

  Once that is in progress, we would put together a package of everything we know or think we know about the fires, and send that to various law enforcement agencies, governmental departments, Gage-Trent Farming, Hayden Valley Agriculture, and dozens of press outlets nationwide. The package wouldn’t be as complete as I’d like, but it would have to do.

  I don’t like relying on others to tie things up, though. Plus, I’d rather the immediate focus not be on Evan and Sawyer, which would be the case if we expose the abuse first. They’ve already gone through enough. Yes, it’ll all eventually come out, but things would be a whole lot easier if Chuckie’s outside criminal activities are the impetus for his arrest. Which explains choice number two.

  For that plan to be successful, we need a little time. Actually, we could use more than a little, but I don’t think we can push matters more than another twenty-four or, at the outside, thirty-six hours. Can we wrap up the Mercy Arsonist case and tie Chuckie to it so tightly that he can never get free? I think so. I…hope so.

  Worst case, if we can’t, we’ll go back to choice number one.

  Getting the extra time is the problem. Whether or not we rest on the shoulders of someone else, we have no control over.

  I explain my plan to Jar and she agrees. We go back inside.

  Evan is still not back. With the sudden dread that he and Sawyer have slipped out a window, I go check on him and breathe a sigh of relief. He’s in the bedroom sitting next to Sawyer, who’s fast asleep, an arm around Terry the Tiger.

  I stick my head into the room and whisper, “Come on back when you’re ready.”

  “Okay,” Evan whispers back. “Give me a minute.”

  When I return to the living room, Jar plays me a series of quick clips from the Prices’ house—Chuckie leaving the master bedroom, dressed for work; Chuckie heading downstairs without a glance at the boys’ rooms; Chuckie pulling a raincoat out of a downstairs closet; Chuckie leaving by the side door; Chuckie entering the garage, where he gets into the Mustang and drives away.

  In other words, he went to work without knowing his sons were gone.

  Jar starts to play another clip, this one featuring Kate, but we hear Evan exiting the bedroom and closing the door.

  I cut to the chase. “Has she called anyone?”

  “No,” Jar says.

  “What’s she doing now?”

  Jar taps a few keys, and a live feed comes up from the Prices’ living room. A cup of coffee and a piece of paper sit on the table in front of the couch. Instead of sitting, Kate is pacing.

  “The boys’ note?” I ask, pointing at the table.

  Jar nods.

  That’s why she hasn’t calle
d everyone she knows, looking for her sons.

  As soon as Evan enters the room, I say, “How’s Sawyer?”

  “He seems to be sleeping well. The mattress seems to be helping. Thank you.”

  I motion to the chair he used before. “Have a seat. We have something we need to discuss.”

  His eyes narrow warily.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s nothing bad. We want to talk about helping you.”

  “Helping? How?” He sounds as if he doesn’t believe it’s possible.

  “By making your father never be a problem for you again.”

  He huffs a laugh. “Right. Like that’s ever going to happen.”

  “This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve done something like this.”

  His expression is still guarded, but also curious now.

  “Have a seat,” I say again.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  My phone sits on the table in front of Evan. I’ve changed the settings so that our call will not be identified by a number but only by his first name.

  “Ready?” I ask.

  He doesn’t move.

  “Evan?”

  He blinks, looks at me, and nods.

  “We can run through it again if you want,” Jar says. We’ve practiced the call several times, going over potential directions it might take.

  “No,” he says. “Let’s…let’s just get it over with.”

  I’ve input the number already so I hit CALL and tap the speakerphone function.

  I look at Jar. She’s sitting on the other side of the table, looking at her open laptop. Neither Evan nor I can see her screen, but I know she’s watching the feed from Evan’s house.

  Before the call can ring a second time, Jar glances at me and nods. Kate has picked up her phone.

  A click, then, “Evan? Oh, my God. Evan, are you there?”

  Evan wets his lips but doesn’t say anything.

  “Hello?” his mom says. “Can you hear me? Evan?”

  The sound of his mother’s voice has paralyzed him. I touch his arm. He blinks, takes a breath, and says, “I’m here.”

  “Thank God! Are you all right? Is Sawyer all right?”